Northwest Wales

Welsh rainforest

Llennyrch and Coed Felinrhyd (also known as Melenrhyd) are superb examples of a “Welsh rainforest”, one of Europe’s best remaining examples of Atlantic oak woodland with an outstanding Atlantic flora of bryophytes and lichens. here (Plantlife). See also The Guardian

Landscape arts gallery

Approaching Blaenau Ffestiniog, I feel I have landed in a black-and-white film. Everywhere I look, the monochrome of slate fills the screen. Yet somewhere within it, like the glow inside a coal fire in the grate, I know David Nash is there, inside his chapel studio filled to the rafters with his works of wood: a furnace of imagination and adventure in a sombre world. Gigantic spoil-heaps of slate, angular molehills thrown up by the mines, rise away steeply in silhouette, dwarfing the sombre terraced houses and their gleaming roofs. The steep paths of the quarrymen zigzag up, or ramp in diagonals across the gloomy, unstable screes that loom everywhere above the town. A ruined viaduct leans out into a void. Tramways and railway tracks run to the cliff edges of the heaps, buffered by air. After the soft wooded valleys you wind through on your way up, it is a treeless world, except for the odd rhododendron clinging to the slate, or hugging the wall of a roofless winding-house. There is something architectural about the zigzags, diagonals and monochrome waste-tips of broken slates, discarded like loose change because only those few that split cleanly could be used to roof houses.